Click here to read the National Institute of Justice’s recently released Draft Baseline Specifications for Law Enforcement Service Pistols with Security Technology. There’s a lot of interesting “dumb” requirements.

The new pistol has to be a matt black or dark gray striker-fired handgun with no more than an eight-pound trigger pull, no finger grooves and no external safety. And fire 10k times without failure. A GLOCK basically. As for the electronic component, engadget.com reports that . . .

The security device is to be a permanent part of the pistol, but can include externally worn items such as rings, wristbands or tokens. More than one person can be programmed to operate the gun, and the security device must not alter the normal operation of grasping and firing the pistol, nor increase the time needed to grab, draw from a holster and fire the weapon.

If electromagnetic interference may affect the security device, countermeasure detection tech must also be installed to allow the user to fire the gun “when an attempt to block the authorization process is detected.”

The security device must covertly inform the operator when the gun is ready to fire, and if it uses batteries, the batteries may be rechargeable, but must be replaceable. And if power is running low, the security device must warn the user with sufficient time to safely take action. Finally, if the security device malfunctions, it must default to a state to allow the pistol to fire, and should be designed to be easy to reset or disengage in such cases.

So a government-mandated smart gun — susceptible to jamming — must have a counter-jamming device to defeat electronic interference someone (e.g., the government) may use to render the gun useless. What could possibly go wrong?

engadget.com reckons “it’s nice to see the authorities make strides towards President Obama’s goal of developing advanced gun safety technology.” The NIJ is submitting the draft for public comment so . . . comment.

How about giving them to the poor and improvised, like Obama did with cell phones. The rest of the law bidding public gets issued a jamming device to prevent crime! That way our streets will be safer and bad guys cant shoot anyone.

I cannot possibly imagine any active electronics that will survive the harsh accelerations that are part of firing the gun. Survive a few shots, maybe even 100 shots, sure? Survive 10,000 shots? No way.

Red dot sights are absurdly simple. It’s just a simple circuit with a light emitting diode and a lens that reflects that exact wavelength of light while being transparent to all other visible wavelengths.

It would be surprising to see Glock get involved. They have built a reputation and a market based almost entirely on being reliable. That’s their whole thing. They don’t build pretty guns or fancy guns. They build reliable, utilitarian guns. Building a “smart” gun (that’s more likely to break or malfunction than a “dumb” gun) is a pretty risky venture for a company that seems to really like to avoid risk.

That makes perfect sense. If you are forced to buy/carry this abomination all you have to do to defeat the system is let the batteries run dry and never charge or replace them. And all for only an additional $9,500.00.

You could also just get a wrist mounted EM field device. If the circuitry detects EM interference it allows the gun to fire normally. I don’t know how much interference it would take, but you can buy everything you would need at your local hardware store.

^
No no no no….. This could never be done because they would make something like that illegal and if its illegal then nobody can ever do it so it doesnt exist lalalalalallalalllala i cant hear reality in my safe place!!!!

If electromagnetic interference may affect the security device, countermeasure detection tech must also be installed to allow the user to fire the gun “when an attempt to block the authorization process is detected.”

As an electrical engineer, I can say these people are naive and not informed on the subject. Obviously, if the authorization process is blocked, then it is blocked. Allowing the device to continue to operate pretty much defeats the purpose of it having transmitters/receivers, etc. Also, the device can’t conclusively make a decision that “blocking” is attempted. If it receives no signal, it receives no signal and that could very well be the same as not having your pairing watch or whatever and it still fires.

All it takes is one guy capturing the device and watch, and creating sufficient noise to disable it and positively verify such. Once that occurs police everywhere would have to have their firmware updated everywhere in their gun/watch to try to prevent such. The law simply stating “countermeasure detection tech must also be installed” doesn’t adjust reality or the physical universe to make it so.

I think you missed something here (I’m an EE too). The requirement is that the weapon default to “fire” in the event of interference. Of course, if you can somehow physically block (or perfectly cancel) the signal, that’s essentially undetectable. But the more likely and practical candidate is jamming, drowning the real signal in noise. That would probably be detectable. In such cases the gun would unlock.

Of course, what this means is that the gun is no more personalized than one of those guns with the magnetic ring. Just make a watch that intentionally puts out nose, it’ll make any such gun work. Of course, given the general bypass requirement, that’s pretty much already moot.

I’m a SWE (software engineer) and I would design it to use industry standard rolling key encryption (you know, the stuff criminals can spoof in under ten minutes to steal a car) to send an unlock signal every N µs while it’s in range, so we allow the gun to fire. And if the lock signal doesn’t arrive, there could be interference or the activator could be malfunctioning or damaged, or the cop could be using his off hand, so allow the gun to…oh wait…

Or maybe use an industry standard like SSL (you know, the protocol that somebody finds a major security hole in at least once a year) to create a bidirectional link between the firearm and any activators in range (say 10cm or so). If the link is there, an authorized user is holding it, allow the gun to fire. If the link ever drops, assume something is wrong, so allow the gun to…oh wait…when do we block it again?

Seriously though, using an “in range” activator is just moronic. In a scuffle, there’s no way to tell if the cop has his gun, if the criminal he’s wrestling with has his gun, if the cop has his gun in his off hand, etc.
There’s also no way to accurately measure range. I worked on a project where we were using RFID readers to determine the location of commercial inventory by reading RFID tags placed on the items. And with multiple antennas detecting the same tag we were lucky to get a location within one meter (projected onto a plane 1m above the ground). We gave up trying to measure distance from the reader to the tag, because it was impossible. And these were large antennas, a foot across, drawing power off a 110V outlet.

No one will earn a government contract to build these for at least ten years (probably 20). If anyone gets a contract sooner, cops will probably die.

Im sure someone will make an app for smart phones that will undermine this whole smartgun thing 48hrs after something like this goes primetime….. I can’t wait to watch that news report as LE guns nationwide go down…… I don’t think the gov’t is going to care though…. It’s your money being wasted on this and not theirs.

At any rate, the requirement that the handgun default to “enabled” mode when the handgun detects jamming is a huge, HUGE, HUGE Achille’s heel.

The net result: such a smart handgun only prevents lazy/stupid thugs from using that handgun. Any thug who is motivated/smart will simply acquire a jamming device that puts the gun in “enabled” mode and be able to fire it at will.

Note: once the thug has acquired the handgun and absconded, he/she can take it apart and remove the electronic device resulting in a “normal” handgun that works without requiring a jammer.

Unless it interprets signal loss while wrestling with the watch/gun as an attempt to block authentication, in which case it will fire anyway.

Exactly. Signals are what determines whether the gun defaults to fire or detects that the watch isn’t present and goes into disabling the gun. Magic (or laws) doesn’t make this happen – engineering does. A user can take the watch/gun combination and observe the communications and engineer a solution to disable the firearm and he doesn’t need a watch to do it. It is completely possible he can have a larger power transmitter that disables all the police firearms! All you have to do is make the firearm detect the watch not present. You don’t have to use noise, you can just interrupt communications between the watch and the firearm with your own data. How often seriously do people try to grab a cop’s firearm? The end result, in my opinion, is the police firearm is a “non smart” gun, or disabled. A net negative for the police.

“The point is not to prevent theft, it is to keep the owner from being shot with their own gun”

Too bad it won’t do that. I’m no electrical engineer but I’ve spent enough time around 2-way radios to know that what you’re saying has way more pitfalls than you seem to want to believe. This is attempting to apply science fiction to reality.

“…countermeasure detection tech must also be installed to allow the user to fire the gun “when an attempt to block the authorization process is detected.”

Simply put: this isn’t possible. The gun can’t detect “jamming” it only detects the incoming signal as “good”, “bad/garbled” (interference possible) and “no signal” (interference or something else). It has no ability to reason and therefore cannot determine when disabling the lockout feature is a good idea. “No signal” could be the result a transmitter out of range, out of battery or destroyed by incoming/a struggle. “Bad signal” could be caused by any number of things as well. There’s no way for the receiver to know unless this is very obvious electronic jamming by overpowering the transmitter and I doubt this thing would be analog, so it wouldn’t be hard to just create digital interference the gun can’t decipher.

“Finally, if the security device malfunctions, it must default to a state to allow the pistol to fire, and should be designed to be easy to reset or disengage in such cases.”

Here we see the crux of the problem. If it’s easy to reset or disengage then a non-owner can do it. This, combined with above, means that the whole system is useless. There is simply no way to make this system work in a way that it will make the right choice all the time or even most of the time.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of why here. First, let’s assume that the transmitter has a range of 10′ (it can be anything but that’s just easy to work with). If the gun is taken in a grappling match the perp will be within range of the transmitter and the gun will function normally. The owner is shot. If the gun is taken outside the 10′ range the receiver can’t know why it has lost signal and therefore must revert to “fire” mode in case the transmitter has been lost or destroyed by a struggle or incoming fire. So at 10′ it also fires. Again, what the range is doesn’t matter, close this down to 6″ and the result is the same.

This means that biometric sensing is the ONLY way to go here. However that provides problems of it’s own such as proper and timely reading (which it currently doesn’t have). It basically needs to work instantly and nothing works instantly. A read error or a software/firmware hangup gets the owner killed if they really need the weapon.

On top of all of this, batteries are required no matter what. They seem to think they’ve got that covered with some sort of warning but they can’t know that. Batteries fail catastrophically on their own. They leak nasty stuff all over the place and they destroy electronics by doing so. A burst battery in your gun renders it inoperable. Now they say that in such a case the gun would revert to “fire” mode, but that would require that however the device functions it’s 1) active and 2) 100% guaranteed to return to passive (unlocked) mode. That’s not possible. Every device can fail and sudden loss of power would mean that an actively held mechanical structure would have to retract. Dirt, grime, damage etc can cause this not to happen. On top of that, it’s pretty clear they want the batteries to be changeable rapidly in case they need to be changed in a gunfight. If changing the batteries is as easy as swapping mags, the guy who took it from you can do that.

All in all this is a stupid fantasy idea born out of people thinking Judge Dredd is realistic.

Don’t be naive…. If they can force the military and police to have this overpriced and unnecessary crap then we are next….. They require all new guns have this technology, price certain socio-economic strata out of the gun market, and play the long game…… Stop using your logical brains to think and think like a gun grabber.

Remember though…. Stun setting can only be used on people older than 16 and younger than 60. Cant be used in wet environments. Cant be used against people who appear to be under the influence. And you have to summon immediate medical attention and they have to be evaluated by a medical doctor at a hospital…… Everybody else has to be shot othwise you’ll be in violation for improperly employing the stun setting on your phased plasma rifle.

These aren’t technical specifications…they’re political specifications. That’s why they don’t align with the real world. The fact that this idea makes guns next to useless for self-defense and/or fighting tyranny is, no doubt, a feature to the authors.

How so? Mount a neodymium magnet on the accessory rail: permanent EM interference field, gun fires normally.
The requirements to make it function when things go wrong make the requirements absolutely useless…well useless to increase gun safety. They are quite useful for people who want to show how dangerous “smart” defensive guns are.

The prohibotive cost of these features price most people out of the firearms market. Thats how you disarm your populous and ensure that only the ruling elite have access to firearms while still pretending that the 2nd amendment still exists.

No…. You can keep the requirments exactly the same. You just make the price of “sane, safe, and smart” guns so high that YOU wont have a gun to worry about….. because you wont be able to afford a legal gun anymore…. Political requirements. Not technical requirements, not common sense requirements.

Well… except for the 400 million some odd guns we already have… Not seeing how the PTB plan to eliminate all of them successfully. And so, even if they get their wet dream legislated, I don’t see a real problem here. Between the black/gray market and home gun production of all sorts, if Americans don’t comply and enable it, they have already seen the last “gun control” measure that had any chance at all of eliminating our guns, let alone replacing them with this doofus thing.

And, the last I read, nobody in the armed forces or the various “cop” organizations want the damned things anyway. Lots of luck FORCING them to use it. 🙂

So let me understand this, if the firearm is inoperable due to jamming or a loss of power, or if the token is destroyed, it has to be able to fire like a regular gun. So why wouldn’t a criminal simply “attempt” to jam the signal so it switches to “manual” operation, and then use the gun after he has stolen it? Even in a perfect world were this weapons is 100% reliable, how will it prevent a criminal from steeling it and using it down the road?

Maybe I’m not sophisticated enough to understand government requirements, but sounds like the “smart” gun will have a switch to make it go dumb. What’s to stop an “unauthorized user” from flipping the switch and proceeding with mayhem?

“…if the security device malfunctions, it must default to a state to allow the pistol to fire…” I don’t think their definition of “malfunction” is the same as mine. If my gun refuses to fire because, for example, it misread my fingerprint, I call that a malfunction whether or not the identification system is functioning as designed. As an example of such, I give you the Tesla that ran into the side of an 18 wheeler because the Autopilot system failed to detect it. I’m sure Autopilot was working fine right up to the instant of the collision.

Waiting to see who files what on these. Is Armatix the only player in this space with a product right now? I had looked at their patents and figured out how to defeat it in about 30 seconds+time it took to strip the gun. It will save someone from a grab but it will certainly not keep guns out of the hands of people that they think it will.

“4.18.1 Pistols shall have an integrated “lock-out” security device as a permanent part of the pistol that disables the firing control system except when in the control of authorized individuals.”

Permanent means no retrofitting old pistols and no way for it to fire without the security device being installed. Any electronic-mechanical interface would be simple to get around, so this might require electric priming.

“4.18.2 The security device shall be understood to include any externally worn items, such as rings, wristbands, or tokens that perform functions associated with the security device.”

So accessories are ok.

“4.18.3 The security device shall include a programmable authorization system that can be set to allow one or more operators to fire the pistol.”

So you can have 1 to n authorized users. PDs will probably have it configured so any officer can fire any pistol; so you better be able to quickly revoke crypto keys (or equivalent) if any one gets compromised.

“4.18.4 The security device shall not inhibit the operator from firing in either hand, one-handed or two-handed, with and without gloves, in any orientation.”

So no fingerprint scanners or grip sensors. Watches are still in, but the range requirement will make dealing with RF issues tricky.

“4.18.5 The security device shall not alter the normal operation of grasping and firing the pistol as a pistol of the same design that is not equipped with the security device.”

So no buttons either.

“4.18.6 The security device shall not increase the time required by the operator to grasp, draw from a holster, and fire the pistol as a pistol of the same design that is not equipped with the security device.”

It can’t require any separate user action to activate. Whatever it does, it’s gotta be quick.

“4.18.8 If the security device may be susceptible to electromagnetic interference, either intentional or unintentional, the device shall be equipped with countermeasure detection technology that permits the operator to fire the gun when an attempt to block the authorization process is detected.”

How is it supposed to tell the difference between intentional and unintentional? Either way, it has to fail-deadly at the first sign of trouble.

“4.18.9 The security device shall covertly indicate when the pistol is ready to fire.”

Red LED on the back of the slide. This one is pretty simple.

“4.18.10 If the security device uses batteries, the batteries can be rechargeable but shall be replaceable.”

Best place for a battery would be the magazine. Those will be handled enough so a low battery will not be a surprise.

“4.18.11 Low power to the security device shall be indicated covertly with sufficient time to safely take action.”

Blink the LED? Switching mags is something you already practice, so a magazine/battery would work well for this.

“4.18.12 If the security device malfunctions, it shall default to a state to allow the pistol to fire.”

THEN WHAT’S THE POINT OF THE DAMN THING?!

“4.18.13 The security device should be easy for an operator to quickly reset or disengage if there is a malfunction.”

So a built-in off switch. This seems like it was written by someone who does not want it to succeed.

Fail deadly, as this appears to describe, is going to be the only way to get ANY adoption of this type of tech. If I were considering getting a “smart” gun (and I’m not), this is not a terrible start.

That said, the only thing this is useful for is preventing having your own gun immediately used against you.

They may have actually had someone with some intelligence involved in drafting specs, as this does nothing to prevent anyone with a lot of time from defeating the operation, as they likely realize that any device like this can be defeated given time.

Merely a way to funnel taxpayer money to liberal companies for a system that is designed to not stop much of anything, at significant expense. These requirements are set loose for people who “really need the guns”, I’m sure they’ll be much more strict for us peons.

Who want to bet that a significant portion of people stuck with these firearms will simply let the batteries drain and leave them that way? At least Massachusetts and New York cops have a sweet ‘match grade’/’dirty harry’/ultralight’ 8lb trigger pull to look forward to.

Expect frequency to be dedicated by the FCC for this project if it goes through… and for it to be illegal to merely possess equipment capable of transmitting on it by “civilians”.

I don’t see how it would work. If it did work, it would paint a bright-EM beacon on the user which could be used to track them. I see this as another problem.

The big winner will be a major defense contractor who will get a contract on a cost-reimbursement basis and declare its impossible after wasting spending $100 millions in public monies over 5 or 6 years.

Any firearm that relies on technology to use is a disaster waiting to happen. not to mention each gun would have some type of ID number that big brother could track or jam.

Best Way to stop gun violence is tougher laws against criminals not restrictions on the public. I unfortunately live in N. Commiefornia, where the liberal winds blow in from San Francisco. Starting in Jan 2017, I will have to go through a background check to buy ammo, WTF guess ill be making more trips to Reno in the near future.

I like that they are smart enough to make it default to dumb gun state if trouble arises. Problem is that defeats the whole point. All you have to do is wear a jamming device to defeat the whole point of disabling the gun if it’s stolen. I guess you could say at least it makes it harder or w/e. But I hate that line of thinking. Basically this amounts to a gigantic waste of time and money.

NorCal shooter,
The new law in California also makes it illegal to bring in more than 50 rounds of ammo from neighboring states
And only with a hunting license.
I bet police will be monitoring gun stores in Nevada and relaying the license plate number to CHP to stop and search your car for illegally
obtained ammo
Also the agricultural border checkpoint will be asking about ammo
So ammo smuggling is best left to actual criminals
Buy your ammo where you would buy heroin

Kind of defeats the whole purpose. The lock could be disabled by removing (or inserting half-dead) batteries, sustained RF jamming, possibly tampering… The gun will be probably be safe against AD by kids. Not like I find the idea of kids getting their hands on “smart gun” appealing.